A Cavanaugh Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  Sean didn’t comment on the information. He pulled the copy back out from the bottom of the pile and then placed it on top. Cases involving children always got his immediate attention. Someone had to champion the innocent.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he promised with feeling.

  “You’ve got all the numbers,” Tom replied as he turned away and left the lab.

  “Think he’ll actually get to that today?” Kait asked, glancing over her shoulder back at the lab.

  “Yeah, I do,” Tom assured her as they walked down the less than brightly lit hallway back toward the elevator. “My father has a personal vendetta against anyone who harms a kid.”

  Kait stopped dead and looked at him as his words sank in. “Wait. That tall man in the white lab coat, that was your father back there?”

  “He’s my father out here, too,” Tom teased. He could see that his quip had eluded her. She was preoccupied, so he sobered slightly as he repeated, “Yeah, that’s my father.”

  “Why didn’t he say something? Why didn’t you say something?” Kait wasn’t sure exactly why, but she felt like an idiot who’d been shut out and wound up standing awkwardly on the outside of a joke.

  “For the same reason Dad’s not sure what last name he wants to use from here on in, Cavelli or Cavanaugh. He believes in being professional, in relying on not who he knows but what he knows. That’s why, when we’re here, I’m not his son, I’m the detective from Missing Persons. And he’s not my father, he’s the head of the CSI lab, day shift.

  “As it is,” Tom continued as he resumed walking to the elevator, “a lot of the Cavanaughs are always being accused of nepotism, either in the way they got a promotion or in the way someone in their family got one. It’s very important to Dad that he—and the rest of us working at the precinct—rely on merit and not connections.” Stopping in front of the elevator, Tom pushed a button for the car. “Dad’s integrity means a lot to him. He doesn’t want anyone to think that he got to be head of the lab because the chief of Ds is his long-lost brother. He actually became the head of the lab before any of us even knew there was a mix-up.”

  “Hold it—back up,” Kait said. “What mix-up?”

  He’d gotten so used to everyone knowing the story that he’d forgotten that some people didn’t. “Seems that when my dad was born, there was another little boy in the same hospital on the same day. Somehow the names accidentally got mixed up and my dad was taken home by the Cavelli family, while his real family, the Cavanaughs, took home the baby they thought was theirs. That baby died, and my father thrived. The mix-up only came to light a few months ago. We’ve all been adjusting to it since then.”

  “Wow.” It was the only word that seemed to fit there.

  “Yeah. Wow,” he agreed.

  Kait couldn’t help wondering if there were other babies out there who had gotten accidentally switched. In her case, it wasn’t even something she could remotely hope for. She’d been born behind bars, when her mother was serving time. From her limited information, there had been no one to get switched with. The last baby in the prison hospital had been born six months before her.

  The elevator arrived and they got on. Tom pressed the button corresponding to their floor.

  “How long have you known about this mix-up?” she asked him.

  In a way it felt as if he’d just found out yesterday. In another, it was as if he’d known about this forever. The truth was found somewhere in between.

  “Just a few months,” he admitted. “Four, if you want a number.”

  For just a moment, Kait tried to put herself in the other detective’s position. What if she suddenly discovered that her parents had been important people in the community instead of a dead, small-time thief and his junkie girlfriend? Most likely, she’d probably feel excited—and cheated at the same time. Cheated because she’d been passed around as a child and had missed out on being treated like a human being.

  But Ronald did his best to make that all up to you, remember? And the minute he could adopt you, he did. If you’d had a normal background, you might never have met Ronald. And you would have been poorer for it.

  She realized that Tom was watching her because she’d suddenly grown so silent. She didn’t want him asking her any questions, so she asked him one instead. “How do you feel about being a Cavanaugh?”

  “Not sure yet,” he admitted honestly. “They cast long shadows and there’s a lot to live up to.”

  “Afraid you can’t?” she asked. He didn’t strike her as the insecure type.

  “Blunt,” he acknowledged. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “What’s the point?” she challenged. “You don’t find things out that way and what happens is that you get left with a lot of unanswered questions.”

  “All right, to answer your question.” Tom obliged. “No, I’m not afraid that I won’t be able to live up to their reputation. I do pretty good work and I’m comfortable in my own skin.”

  He certainly seemed that, she thought. “That puts you up on a lot of people.”

  He looked at her for a long moment and then asked, “On you?”

  She laughed shortly. “Now who’s being blunt?”

  Reaching their floor, the elevator stopped and its doors opened. He gestured toward her, giving her the credit as he said, “I learn from the best.”

  Smooth, she thought. “And who taught you how to flatter like that?”

  “I came by that naturally,” he told her.

  He’d probably be surprised that she took his words to heart as a warning. Because he had a way about him, she’d already learned that. A way of being able to extract information out of her, of having her tell him things she’d had no intentions of owning up to. By working his black magic, he’d learned more about her in a little less than two days than most people she worked with on the force back in New Mexico had in the six years she’d been there.

  But that was because she kept to herself for the most part. That wasn’t as easy to do here around Cavelli/Cavanaugh or whatever he wanted to call himself.

  She walked back to her temporary desk, promising herself she was going to be more vigilant. And silent.

  The rest of the day was spent going around in circles. At least that was how it felt when she was about to call it a night and leave the precinct. The reprint of the fake driver’s license hadn’t yielded a match so far from the databases that Sean had accessed.

  A call to the clerk back at the car-rental agency had proved to be equally fruitless. The van hadn’t been returned. The contact number that had been left in the file got them nowhere, as well.

  The moment she pressed the last digit on the landline keypad, Kait heard a teeth-jarring, high-pitched noise screeching out of the receiver.

  She winced as she pulled it away from her ear. Suppressing a few choice words she had for the clerk at the rental agency, she dropped the receiver back into the cradle with a resounding noise.

  “What was that?” Tom asked, his own teeth set on edge just from the echo of the noise.

  “Apparently the guy who abducted Megan left a fax number with the rental agency. What?” she asked when she saw the sudden alert look that came into the other detective’s eyes.

  “Whenever my sister Bridget orders something online and she doesn’t want to give out her home number, she uses the old fax number she had while she was working for a temp agency when she was still in college. She never got around to getting rid of it. Maybe the guy we’re after does the same thing.”

  She didn’t see where this was going. “Okay…” she drew out, waiting for him to fill in more.

  “My point is that maybe the number’s connected to the guy somehow. A fax line he maintains for some professional reasons.” He shrugged. The reason was unimportant, as long as the number was traceable. “It’s worth exploring,” he urged. “What’s the number?”

  Instead of rattling it off, Kait handed him the piece of paper with the number that she’d scri
bbled down yesterday on it. “Here.”

  He was already on his feet. “I’ll run it down,” he told her.

  Maybe being around him challenged her to think harder. Whatever the reason, ideas had begun popping up in her brain. “Wait a second. I just thought of something.”

  He heard the excitement in her voice and turned to face her. “Go ahead.”

  Her eyes were shining as she took him into her thought process. “The guy who abducted Megan had to sign some papers agreeing to the fees and all that stuff when he originally rented the van.”

  He knew where she was going with this. The same thought had just occurred to him. “And he had to have handled the paper when he handed it back to the clerk.”

  “Which means his fingerprints have to be on the paper.” Her excitement grew. “If he’s ever been arrested or held down a civil-servant job, or enlisted in the army—”

  “His prints would be on file,” Tom declared. “Let’s go get that form,” he proposed eagerly and then paused to suggest a ground rule. “Can we use just one car this time?”

  Maintaining her independence took a backseat to the possibility of a breakthrough. “Sure, why not?” she agreed.

  Right now, all that mattered was getting back to the agency before something inadvertently happened to the form the kidnapper had filled out.

  “You know,” Tom observed as they hurried out of the squad room again, “we don’t make such a bad team after all.”

  The comment made her realize that he’d had the same misgivings about her as she’d had about him when they’d started out.

  “No,” she allowed, reaching the elevator. “Not so bad.” She glanced up on the numbers above the closed stainless-steel doors. Currently, the elevator was on the top floor. “Why don’t we use the stairs?”

  It wasn’t a suggestion. Crossing over to the corner, she was already pulling the door to the stairwell open. He wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting to talk her out of it. The police detective from New Mexico was flying on pure adrenaline.

  As was he.

  Forty-five minutes later, after assuring the uncertain car-rental agency clerk that it was within their authority to commandeer the suspect’s application for the van—Tom underscored the fact that a little girl’s life was at stake—they obtained the sought-after sheet and slipped it into a clear plastic envelope and quickly returned to the precinct. They went straight down to the lab.

  Tom’s father was exactly where they had left him, diligently working on the fragments of the dress he’d been brought. Behind him, on the right-hand side of the computer screen, dozens of faces flashed by per minute as the program sought to match the stationary photograph on the left.

  “Twice in one day. To what do I owe this second pleasure?” Sean asked, looking up. And then he saw the single sheet of paper Tom held out to him. “Ah, you brought me more. Afraid I’d run out of work?” he asked, amused.

  “It’s the abductor’s application for a rental car,” Kait told him. “We’re hoping you might be able to lift a clean fingerprint from it.”

  It wasn’t like Tom to miss the bigger picture, Sean thought. Nevertheless, he pointed out the obvious. “The suspect rented a car? Why don’t you bring that in? There’s bound to be more available prints on it.”

  The problem there would be in isolating the right fingerprints, Sean thought. But nothing was ever easy or cut-and-dried. If it was, it usually turned out to be the wrong answer.

  “We would if we could,” Kait told him with a frustrated, disappointed sigh. “But nobody’s returned the van yet. Something tells me that it probably won’t be coming back.”

  Sean had another opinion. “Don’t be so sure.”

  “Why would he bother?” Kait asked, curious.

  “Criminals can surprise you. They have their own strange code to abide by, and while they might kidnap, they won’t steal or do something that they think might bring the law down on them more quickly.” Having taken the sheet from Tom, Sean carefully removed it from the plastic envelope. “Let me see what I can do with this. Meanwhile—” He nodded toward the computer on his left “—I’m running that photo for you. So far, there’s been no match,” he said, then smiled for Kait’s benefit. “But that doesn’t mean there won’t be.”

  “Is he always so optimistic?” she asked Tom as they walked back to the elevator.

  Tom laughed softly. “Always. He’s very possibly the most upbeat person I’ve ever known. He always had a way of being able to find a small kernel of good even in the absolutely worst situations.”

  “The only thing good in this case would be if we do find Megan,” Kait said, then grimly tagged on the all-important condition. “Alive.”

  Tom nodded. A realist, he was still unwilling to even remotely entertain the alternate possibility. But he was aware that even if they did find Megan in time, there might be a wealth of damage to undo. Damage that, most likely, would take long-term counseling before the little girl could even approach normalcy.

  “Why don’t we see if we can track down that fax number now?”

  In her excitement, she’d almost forgotten all about that. Grateful for having something to do, she nodded. “Lead the way. I’m right behind you,” she told him.

  Yes, Tom thought again, we really don’t make such a bad team after all.

  As it turned out, the fax number didn’t belong to a residential home.

  They tracked it down to a place of business that handled large volumes of reproductive work for other businesses in the area. Disappointed, they returned to the precinct only to be told by Tom’s father that the fingerprints that he managed to lift from the rental application did not match any that could be found in the system.

  “So we have a law-abiding abductor who never broke any laws,” Kait said in disgust.

  “Or, at least, was never caught breaking them,” Tom pointed out.

  “Well, one way or another, it still doesn’t do us any good.” She was having a hard time remaining hopeful at this point. “Now what?”

  Tom pushed his chair away from his desk and took a deep breath. He knew when to walk away. Not to quit, but to recharge so that he could come at this from a fresh direction. “Now how about I buy you dinner?”

  How could he even think about eating, she thought, annoyed and edgy. They were running out of time—if they hadn’t run out of it already. “I’m not hungry,” she told him. “There’s got to be something we’ve missed,” she insisted, saying it more to herself than to him.

  “And we’ll figure it out,” he told her, getting up and moving behind her chair, which he pulled away from the desk. “But you haven’t eaten anything almost all day, and you can’t push yourself like that.”

  Annoyed, still sitting in the chair, she “walked” herself back in behind the desk. “I’ve done it before.”

  “Congratulations.” This time, he turned her around in the chair to face him. “But you’re not doing it on my watch. Let’s go to Malone’s.”

  “What’s ‘Malone’s’?” she asked, still not ready to give in.

  “A place where it’s too noisy to hear yourself think. Everyone from the precinct turns up there at one time or another to kick back and socialize.” He looked at her pointedly. “You could use the break, Kait.”

  She was about to protest that she was fine, that she didn’t need a break and that if he felt he needed one, he was welcome to take it. But while she carried out these arguments in her head, Kait realized that the man was right. She was operating on fumes now and while she wasn’t consciously hungry, she did feel pretty wiped out. Maybe if she ate something, she would feel more energetic again.

  At the same time, it occurred to her that he’d referred to her by her first name. When had that happened? She wasn’t altogether sure if she was comfortable with that. But, like with everything else, she couldn’t tell him to stop—because he wouldn’t. The man didn’t exactly take direction very well.

  “Okay, if you’re so keen on eati
ng,” she said, rising to her feet, “we’ll eat.”

  His grin was just short of triumphant. “Very considerate of you,” he said.

  She knew the comment was partially sarcastic, but to avoid getting into an argument, she pretended he was serious. “I try,” she told him.

  Chapter 9

  Well, he certainly hadn’t exaggerated about the noise, Kait thought half an hour later.

  There was a great deal of noise, and it rose and fell like the swell of the tide along the beach. The moment she had opened the door and walked into the publike establishment that, she was told, was like a second home to a great many members of Aurora’s police department, the noise had instantly engulfed her.

  Seated now at a small table for two with their dinners—cheeseburgers and fries—in front of them, Kait quickly discovered that it was hard to carry on a conversation and even harder to form coherent thoughts and follow them to their logical conclusion. For one thing, she kept getting distracted by a stray fragment of a sentence she’d pick up. For another, people kept stopping by their table for a quick exchange with Tom. She began to think that she was the only one with trouble hearing.

  After the last visitor—Dax Cavanaugh, one of the chief of detective’s sons—had left once he’d asked them how the investigation was going—he’d met his wife while trying to locate a child who’d been kidnapped from her private school—Kait had turned toward Tom.

  “You like this?” she asked, shouting the question at him out of necessity. After half an hour of this, her throat was becoming sore.

  In order to hear her better, and to help her hear him, Tom dragged his chair in closer to her until their chairs touched.

  “Yeah,” he answered, then added with a grin, “I think of it as therapy.”

  Shaking her head, she looked around at all the people, either seated at the tables or standing lined up along the long bar.

  “If you ask me, it’s more like being locked up in the insane asylum,” she commented.